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Dell Says Re-Imaging HDs a Burden If Word Banned
N!NJA writes "In an amicus curiae brief filed on Aug. 24, Dell asked the judge overseeing the Eastern District Court of Texas to reconsider its order blocking sales of Word, part of the original ruling in favor of Canadian software developer i4i. In the worst case, the brief argued, the injunction should be delayed by 120 days. 'The District Court's injunction of Microsoft Word will have an impact far beyond Microsoft,' Dell and HP wrote. 'Microsoft Word is ubiquitous among word processing software and is included on [redacted] computers sold by Dell.' 'If Microsoft is required to ship a revised version of Word in Dell's computers, a change would need to be made to Dell's images,' Dell wrote. 'Making such a change would require extensive time- and resource- consuming testing.' An addendum to the brief notes that it was authored in Microsoft Word, part of Office 2003."
Except that's not what the injunction says. The quotes I can find say:
Given that Amazon.com "sells" some ebooks for $0, I doubt that shipping Word without charging for the license would pass the "selling or importing" ban.
The injunction itself needs to be modified, and given the case Dell and HP make here, it seems like the original injunction was poorly thought out in terms of unintended consequences.
While true, it's also explicitly one of the factors that go into determining whether injunctions should be issued--- they're discretionary relief that is supposed to take into account any hardship the injunction might cause to nonparties.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
All of this is absurd. There is no "undue" harm or burden on Dell or HP here. I speak as someone that worked in dell's testing lab for more than a year creating these images. It would be TRIVIAL for dell to make new images and put them into production. None of the hardware is changing, only the software and only the office suite at that. There is no known case where removing Office (or just word from the office install) would cause any issues. Other than not being able to open a number of document types, but then, that's the whole point. It might take them a week or two, but they have 60 days or more, so it's not like it's going to hurt them. Further, they make new images regularly for new systems, it's not like they don't do this shit every day.
At the end of the day, this is a further play by MS's lackeys to fight this legitimate injunction on behave of MS. Nothing more. Nothing less.
I'll post as an AC since I no longer work for Dell.
I think your customer rep needs a kick up his ass. I used to work in the Enterprise division of Dell earlier and (helped) developed Altiris plug-ins to deploy customer images. If your rep is selling you the consumer imaging tools and/or has not told you about how to deploy your config specific images from Dell's factory or deploy it using Altiris/3rd party plugins on a base image, he must be slacking off.
That said, in many cases, what you are doing is the right thing. Wiping clean the base image and loading your own is often a simple way of keeping images/patch levels to corp standards and to comply with license agreements.
Dell does try to make this process simple and they can provide you more tools to do your job better.